Using Debian GNU/Linux on the Lenovo IdeaPad S9e netbook

I recently got my hands on a Lenovo IdeaPad S9e netbook for a short amount of time (I don't own it), so I did a few tests with Debian unstable (more or less Lenny right now) and a Linux 2.6.28 kernel on it, see results below.

BIOS

You can enter the BIOS by pressing F2, the boot menu by pressing F12 during boot. Booting from USB works fine on this netbook. There's a Splashtop installation on the netbook (called "Lenovo Quickstart" here) which you can disable in the BIOS.

Installation

There's no CD-ROM drive, so the simplest way is to use a USB thumb drive for installation. Here's how you can prepare one containing a Lenny installer (assuming your USB thumb drive is /dev/sda):

If the above USB thumb drive doesn't boot correctly (which it did not in my case: GRUB error 17) it's probably because of a messed-up MBR. This is how you can fix it:

$ apt-get install mbr
$ install-mbr /dev/sda

Then insert the USB thumb drive in the Lenovo IdeaPad S9e, choose USB boot in the BIOS, and start the installer. Most of the process works as usual, the only small difference is that you might want to load the "parted" installer module in order to resize the Windows-partition on the disk (if you want to keep it) to make space for Linux. The second (fat32) partition seems to keep a restore image and/or the Splashtop stuff, not sure.

Audio

Works out of the box using the snd_hda_intel driver. The hardware is onboard audio in the southbridge (82801G / ICH7) and uses the Realtek ALC269 codec. If some programs don't have working audio, try modprobe snd-pcm-oss.

Built-in microphone

Untested so far.

Bluetooth

Works out of the box using the bluetooth and btusb driver. The laptop's Bluetooth device is USB-attached internally and shows up in lsusb as:

After a few test I found that s2ram -f -a 3 works fine (tested from console only so far). Now this needs to be integrated upstream and in the Debian package (I'll file a bug report). Update: Submitted bug #520848, and an email to the upstream mailing list.

Wireless

There doesn't seem to be a mainline driver for the Broadcom BCM4312 wifi card in the laptop, yet:

Neither the b43 nor the b43legacy drivers work as of 2.6.28. For now, one of two possible options is to build a (partly non-free) driver provided by Broadcom from source (option 2 would be to use ndiswrapper, I guess, but that's untested):

You can now run iwconfig, iwlist, etc. from the command line, or use some GUIs such as kwifimanager.

In order to disable wireless, run:

$ rmmod wl

So far, I only tested WEP (but not WPA).

CPU frequency scaling

Works out of the box using the acpi_cpufreq driver. Use cpufreq-set -c 0 -g performance if you need full CPU power, cpufreq-set -c 0 -g powersave otherwise. Use -c 1 to do the same with the other CPU/core.

If you attach an external monitor or projector, you can enable it using xrandr as usual:

$ xrandr --output VGA --auto

You can also use a dual-head setup by adding this to your "Screen" section in /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

SubSection "Display"
Virtual 2048 2048
EndSubSection

After restarting the X server, you can play with xrandr and move the external screen (VGA) "below" the laptop's LCD screen (LVDS) for a simple dual-head setup. The GUI tools arandr or grandr are probably a bit simpler to use than plain command line xrandr.

USB

Works fine, of course. The only small problem is that there are only two USB ports, more would have been better.

I discovered via HTTP browsing that the URL for downloads of the .iso are changed:
http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/5.0.1/i386/iso-cd/debian-501-i386-netinst.iso
Thank you for your useful, accurate and exciting work!

Matthew Garrett says that using the 'powersave' CPU governor results in poorer power savings, since the CPU has to run longer. The 'performance' governor also has its shortcomings, so 'ondemand' is the one to use.